Tales from the Back Row (17 page)

“I've carved out a niche for myself as, I guess, sort of a funny fashion writer, with a strong individual voice. And I just wanted to know how you see me, as a writer, fitting in here?”

“At
Vogue
, we celebrate fashion,” Anna replied. “It doesn't mean
you can't have a strong voice or be funny.
Vogue
celebrates great writing and strong voices.” What she was saying, basically, is that there is little to no skepticism in
Vogue
. Despite all the skepticism its staff seems to have for everyone who walks in the door or who doesn't fit the
Vogue
mold, skepticism is, amazingly, left out of so much of what it publishes. I am skeptical of
everything
all the time. I think there will be gum in every chair I'm about to sit in, and I can't look at a fringed bra top on the runway without wondering about the designer's ­ulterior motives.
They want us to look foolish, I just know it
.

“Thank you for coming,” she said, signaling that our interview was over. “I hate to cut it short, but we've got Sally Singer's good-bye party tonight.” (Sally Singer had recently quit her
Vogue
job to go edit
T
at the
New
York
Times
. She would later return to
Vogue
after
T
didn't work out. So if Anna likes you, you can't say she's not loyal.)

I knew the interview would be short. I was probably in there for less than ten minutes. The doors hadn't shut the whole time, so for all I knew her assistants were standing outside snickering at me and my pathetic answers. As I thanked Anna and stood up, she walked around the desk to shake my hand. When she got to me, she looked me up and down in this really obvious prolonged way, probably to make sure that even if I'm some sort of museum-shunning, ignorant loser I was at least wearing an acceptable outfit. I have no clue if I was or not, but when I returned to the
New
York
mag office after our meeting, one of my colleagues barely glanced at me before saying, “Wow, pretty outfit.” So there was that going for me.

Anna's assistant brought me back to Mark Holgate's office. After I sat down, he asked me how it went. “Good, I guess?” I said. I felt comfortable with him. “It was quick.”

“It's always quick with Anna,” he assured me. As we settled in
for him to ask me more questions, that phone of his rang again. He excused himself. He was obviously going to Anna to talk about me behind my back. It's hard not to be excited about (and even more terrified of!) Anna Wintour being this involved in your existence.

When he came back, the questioning finally resumed. He asked me who my favorite designers were, and I rattled off a few names like Vena Cava and Rick Owens—people in the
Vogue
circle of approval.

He asked me why I liked them, and I said I liked to wear them and something like, “I remember Vena Cava's last show—they were doing so many interesting things with safety pins.” This was a terrible answer.

“But why else do you like them aside from the fact that you like to wear them?” he pressed.

Oh. God. I did not know. I didn't think about clothes in this way—I thought about the industry that makes the clothes more than about the clothes themselves. Because when the industry is ruled by the papal-like force of eccentricity that is Anna, it's hard not to be. This was when I tried to bullshit—always my plan Z—and did a terrible job of it.

And again, to my horror, he asked if I went to museums. So
that's
why he disappeared—to find out what I was deficient in that he should ask me about again. I gave him the same answer I gave Anna—of course, I do that sometimes, like, totally I do!

“What was the last thing you saw?” he asked.

I think I said some fashion thing, because he then prodded me to name something that wasn't fashion. And I couldn't even think of anything. I could think of nothing at all that was going on around town that I could lie about having seen. So I just said, to my shame to this day, “I can't remember.”

Fail.

After Mark, I interviewed with another features editor at the magazine, whose office had windows and whose manner wasn't particularly warm though she
did
offer me a tiny bottle of Perrier. She asked me more hard questions about what I'd like to see done with the magazine, and I had no idea what to say. She also seemed like she didn't want to be talking to me, which made it feel so much worse to be talking to her.

The interviewing took more than two hours. I've had breakups with men I actually liked that took less out of me emotionally. When it all ended, I was incredibly relieved. I felt like I'd accomplished something by trying as hard as I could to get the job. It was like getting off a roller coaster you're really scared to ride but your friends claim to really genuinely want to go on.

A couple of days later, at around 6:50 a.m., Condé Nast HR sent me a rejection email saying that I wasn't quite experienced enough for the position. They were right. I had neither enough professional experience in fashion writing nor enough everyday experience in dressing like not-garbage. If they had hired me, I would have done it well, I'm sure of that, but it would have been an enormous struggle, and I'd have gone on Valium just deciding what to wear every day.

• • •

Now I can look back on my
Vogue
flirtation fondly. I got a great story out of it, I met one of my idols, and I didn't end up drugging myself to get through the scariness of a job that wasn't right for me. I was reminded that the world's best editors are true experts and in some cases practically scholars in the things that they cover,
not just ornaments on the sidelines of runway shows. Not that I didn't enjoy seeing what front-row people look like in their daily lives (still like they belong on street-style blogs). Also, I can go to museums as I see fit, rather than as Anna Wintour sees fit. Not getting hired at
Vogue
led me to
Cosmopolitan.com
, which I love and feel like I am good at. No one wants me to write earnestly about the merits of asymmetrical hemlines at
Cosmo
, which is fantastic. If I rolled into work there wearing my House of Deréon T-shirt, my coworkers would nod in approval and ask me where I got it.

6

Models

adventures at the victoria's secret fashion show

T
hree hundred and sixty-four days out of the year, mail is nothing more to me than desk herpes. Impervious to treatment, it piles up, causing people who walk past my workstation to fear for my hygiene. Only one day out of the year does the mail become something much, much more—carrier of a rare golden ticket to a fantastical fabled thing that will amaze you, change you, and, mostly, make you feel really, really fat: the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show!

The VS show is independent from Fashion Week, and the invite is not just
any
invite. The metallic rectangle is practically lacquered. It's made of such heavy foam-board-like paper stock that once you finish with it, you can reuse it as a cheese board.

When my first-ever invite arrived I RSVP'd immediately. Then I G-chatted my friend Justin.

“i have the golden ticket!!” I wrote.

“i hate u get me one,” he replied.

“can't! admits one. bla bla. should i start dieting now or forever hold onto my breakfast pastries.”

“go barf in the bathroom IMMEDIATELY.”

. . .

“jk jk!”

Roughly 70 percent of the thrill of receiving the invite is the same as that of any other fashion show: just knowing you are Important Enough to be invited. She who goes to the VS show can say:

“I saw Jay Z live, but not the
whole
concert, just his set at the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show.”

“No, I can't do dinner, I have to cover the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show.”

There's an “I'm in, you're out” aspect to it that gives you bragging rights I won't pretend to be above—although I really wished that Justin could have come because you need someone to banter with you about why the models are wearing inflatable emojis that look like baby pool floats and generally look like the Village People if the Village People were lingerie models. I worked as a fashion blogger for several years before I got invited. One year, a print editor tossed me her invite before my time came. I was so excited—until I saw the bolded fine print about invitations being “non-transferrable” along with some other scary language that suggested armed officers would handcuff, arrest, and strip search any thug assistant who tried to enter under her superior's name.

The Victoria's Secret Fashion Show isn't really a fashion show—it's a holiday-time commercial disguised as an hour-long Vegas showgirl spectacular. Only instead of seeing synchronized dance moves and flexibility, you witness the girls walk, smile, wink, blow kisses, and playfully bump butts with the singers. It tapes in November before Thanksgiving and then airs about a month later on
national television. Leading up to the taping and then the broadcast, VS keeps the fashion press busy for months by feeding them every little fact about the production, the costumes, and the diet and exercise routines the models undertake to prepare for the show. The media finds its own stories too, like how year 2010 was the first that an Asian model was cast, which is astounding—a legitimate story—though few outlets really cover these occurrences in any deep way beyond the witlessly enthusiastic “Asian Model Walks!” post. The story does deserve some witless enthusiasm but also some huge glittering question marks about why it took so long for VS to cast an Asian woman.

But this is part of the beauty ideal the brand sells: thin, muscular, tall, and white. It's the commercialized version of a high-fashion runway that freaks everyone out, leads to pervasive portrayals in pop culture of the industry as devilishly fattist, and in some countries inspires laws or other regulations mandating that fashion models' BMIs be a certain number. But trading the weird, asymmetrical black clothing of a high-fashion runway for showgirl-on-crack costumes built upon push-up bras and thong underwear with a side of hair extensions—a beauty ideal seemingly dreamed up for men—prompts millions of people to gladly ignore the reality that Victoria's Secret's fashion shows are no more off-putting than the rest of them. They're just more socially accepted because the clothing and prettiness of the models are things the masses readily understand. If fashion shows are foreign films with subtitles, the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show is
Battleship
, the mass-market action movie with so few words you don't even need subtitles to understand them overseas.

This event is so enthralling because everyone wants to know what the models in the show eat and what they do at the gym so they can adopt these routines and look like them, too.

This fashion show—the most widely viewed in the world—is a bottomless well of media fodder. Yes, it's fun to go to the fashion show and see the bizarre outfits on models in person and watch the world's top pop stars fill in the space around them. But beyond such super­ficial appreciation of the spectacle, the show raises the same questions beauty pageants or nightclub go-go dancers do if you stop and think about them for any length of time. Once you're “in,” you don't want to question the fantasy ginned up by brilliant and aggressive marketing, fantastic costumes, and the world's highest-paid fashion models. You don't want to say what you feel and ruin being invited back again. Access to this exclusive experience effectively blinds many to the reality of what they're witnessing: a bizarre celebration and objectification of wildly hard-to-achieve physical standards.

• • •

The Victoria's Secret Fashion Show has been around since the '90s but didn't become the obsessed-over explosion of glitter and rock-hard abs it is today until around the year 2001, when, according to the
Hollywood Reporter
, ABC broadcast it on television for the first time, astutely realizing that a parade of women wearing underwear stretched to a full hour would get pretty good ratings! In the early years, models just modeled normal-looking lingerie—the kinds of things you'd wear to bed or under clothes but not necessarily just for the purpose of looking glam while wearing nothing but underwear and Halloween costume accessories at the same time. ­
Fashionista.com
reported the 1995 show cost a paltry $120,000.

By 1999, the models were wearing wings that weren't wings so much as repurposed neon signs and feather boas on steroids, which is still nothing compared to what the models wear on the runway today,
much of which wouldn't fit through most double doorways. The show's transformation coincided with the fall of the supermodel and the rise of the celebrity. As it became more difficult to become a household name as a model, the VS Fashion Show outfits became more outlandish. If no new Naomi Campbells came along to sell the show, something else, like the clothes (“clothes”), had to. The brand later figured out how to make its own stars through the strategic anointing of “angels.” It would also assert its own specialness by separating itself from—but still remaining connected to—the fashion industry.

The show used to take place in February, but then moved to a November taping with a December airing, serving as the most epic holiday marketing device of any clothing brand. In terms of sales, the VS Fashion Show has proved a very smart investment. An analyst told
Bloomberg Businessweek
in a 2012 story that the show may cost $12 million, but it “pays for itself.” (That $12 million excludes the fantasy bra getup, which cost $10 million in 2013. To be fair, the fantasy bra came with a
belt
that year.) In 2010, the day after the show aired, the chain saw a daily high in direct business, BuzzFeed reported, adding the brand does an estimated $6.6 billion in annual sales. In 2014 Victoria's Secret was named “the most popular brand of the year,” according to YouGov BrandIndex's ­annual study of apparel brands.

What's amazing is how the company has been able to turn what is basically a big Christmastime commercial into a story that takes the media months to tell. And it all revolves around the hot ladies they carefully pluck usually from relative anonymity and pay quite handsomely to model the pairs of Swarovski-encrusted, fur-trimmed, charm-dangling, gel-stuffed contraptions they call
bras
.

The version of VS models' lives put forth to the press seems to go something like this: Victoria's Secret models are born; they're
perfect. They have babies; they're perfect. Two days after the delivery, they're getting paid by a swimwear company to be fat free and glowing in their forthcoming ad campaign. By the way, they gave birth in their bathtubs with no pain meds. “How do you stay fit, you insanely gorgeous, happy, life-loving woman?” “I like to do yoga once a week and swim with the baby dolphins off the beach in my modest hometown, where my parents operate a small chicken farm [
Giggles!
Hair toss
].” It's mundane. It's mystifying. It's riveting.

I remember looking through those Victoria's Secret catalogs as early as middle school, the days when people still looked at paper pages of things and
called
companies when they wanted to place orders for clothes. (I'll take a stone tablet and a chisel to go with that reference, thanksverymuch.) I thought the women were extremely beautiful—if I planned to look like anyone when I turned nineteen, it was one of them, because these are the things middle school–age girls are conditioned to want—to look this version of perfect.

I was obsessed with Alessandra Ambrosio, who seemed to be the most prolific model of them all despite not getting the most attention in the media (which went to Gisele, probably because she dated post-
Titanic
Leonardo DiCaprio and had abs flatter than a marble countertop).

Alessandra modeled practically
everything
in those days—every garter, every padded disco bra, every pair of sexy sweatpants. The Victoria's Secret catalog then, and now, represented what so many American girls want to be: tan and happiest when doing something as mundane as wearing pink shorts and twirling their hair. Oh, and fat free with boobs.

What I discovered going from looking at pictures of these people to conversing with them in real life is that they look even more unreal in person than they do in photos. These women are freaks
of nature: they're supertall and have insanely slim figures yet still have butts and boobs that curve out from their bodies, as though someone stuffed dinner rolls into their clothes. The other thing you notice immediately about these women is their skin and facial features. Some of them actually have blemishes in person, which feels unnatural to behold when you're so used to seeing the retouched, catalog versions of them. The others naturally have skin that looks like it comes spray-tanned and retouched. Often their eyebrows are twice as thick as yours, as though instead of growing pubic hair they just got a little extra something right above the eyes, because they're #luckygirls. Usually, they're ten times more gorgeous than they are in catalog photos, and you'd hate them for it if you weren't so transfixed by it. I think this means that the camera not only adds ten pounds, it also just makes all of us look uglier. Which is why camera filters that make everyone's cell phone snaps look like Ye Olde Photographs became so popular.

The show cycle typically begins with the announcement of the model bestowed with the honor of wearing the “fantasy bra” in the fashion show. The fantasy bra is covered with diamonds and looks like something from a Carnivale float or one of those stores on Lincoln Road in Miami that sells bedazzled jeans to men. The brand unveils a new fantasy bra each year. The fantasy-bra-wearing model is positioned as the star of the show, and much of the preshow press revolves around her. In recent years, this “angel” (the term for the upper-echelon of Victoria's Secret models who have long-term contracts and may or may not live in houses made of clouds) has delivered a baby. Take a look:

2012: Alessandra Ambrosio wears diamond bra on runway six months after the delivery of son Noah.

2011: Miranda Kerr wears diamond bra on runway eight months after the delivery of son Flynn.

2010: Adriana Lima wears diamond bra a year after delivering first child, daughter Valentina. (Also opened the 2012 show eight weeks after delivering second child, but not in the diamond bra.)

I don't know if VS does this on purpose because postbaby bodies are just so
viral
these days, or if they just pick their favorite model of the moment and many
happened
to have recently had a baby, but a birth automatically adds another significant dimension to the story of the show:
How will she get her pre-baby body back in time?
The curiosity about this gets so intense, so feverish that you'd think these women were picking the jewels off their fantasy bra and giving them away with their answers.

Prior to the 2011 show, Adriana Lima shocked the press with her revelation to a
Telegraph
reporter that she worked out twice a day for the three weeks leading up to it, went on a liquid diet nine days before the show, and stopped drinking and eating anything twelve hours before the show. Her comments stand in stark contrast to many other models and entertainers who claim to get in shape through occasional yoga and never dieting. Her comments also deeply
surprised
the American public, like we all expected her to spend the three months leading up to the show sitting on her ass in front of the TV eating fried chicken and drinking eggnog. But we were taken aback nonetheless because most celebrities claim that looking model-y is as easy as existing (which some would argue is true if you take into account Photoshop). But I don't know why more of them don't admit that it takes a nutritionist, a trainer, time, money, kelp salads, what have you, to look the way they do.
What would happen if they let their secrets out? The rest of us would look like them? No—most of America is content working their desk jobs, avoiding the gym, and never consuming a $12 green juice ever, which, to be fair, tastes bad in addition to costing as much as a dinner salad at TGI Fridays.